Some of the designers who made it happen

I'd give 10 stars if I could and would highly recommend this designer. Professional. Patient. Very responsive. Thank you.

- Anonymous

Finalist
- Andrew Tanenbaum

A great designer

- Anonymous

Finalist
- ELGER

Awesome work as always! Starting another project now :)

- james1c

How jericor started their web page design journey

Who are you known as?

HoustonProperties

Tell us a bit about who you are and the people you reach

We're a Keller Williams affiliated real estate brokerage providing Realtor assistance to homebuyers and sellers in Houston, Texas USA. We are currently the #1 Keller Williams ranked Realtor in the State of Texas.

We target the luxury market. Our average client’s home price is $625,000 and our properties range up to $5,000,000. The look and feel of the our website and “Buyers” page should represent a luxury feel.

We generate most of our business from referrals and our website. Leads come from lead capture forms on our website. Conversion is aided by our tools (Buyers page, Home Valuation, etc). The updated Buyers page design should be geared towards usability first and aesthetics second, as it is exclusively used by people who are already in our database.

We do want to have a more consistent banner, header (navigation styling), footer and wrapper. The goal is to have a great overall theme for this Buyer page, which we can then use for the rest of our tools and pages.

Page descriptions

As noted above: THE WINNER OF THIS PROJECT WILL ALSO BE HIRED TO WORK ON OUR OTHER 3 LANDING PAGES.

Key things for us: we like to keep the page simple (we like current color styling, we just need to improve it) and consistent with our luxury brand. This is more of a "refresh" rather than a complete overhaul of the page.

1. WRAPPER: This includes the basic navigation, header, and footer elements. The problems with the current wrapper include:

- The CSS elements are all very code heavy and convoluted. We want everything to be tied together, which is why we're starting with a new design.
- The current header looks clean and it works, but there's a lot of wasted space and we can improve how they all go together (specially on mobile)
- We don't even have the footer here. As you can see, the footer section is missing. We'll need to add the footer items (starting at "Why We're Different" section to the bottom) here: https://homes.houstonproperties.com…-29221804/. Obviously the styling has to be updated to fit the new design of theme of the Buyer Page.

2. PROPERTY PREVIEW: This is the property view on the left side of the current Buyers Page. A good designer can easily spot the issues here (specially after reviewing the models), but to highlight a few things:

- Usability: User can't easily see "arrow" icons; it's not obvious that it's a preview (user can click on the image or address and open the full property page); the layout of the details (address, beds, baths, price, etc) is bad; it's not immediately obvious that each property represents an icon on the map to the right; it's not immediately obvious that each property has a status (Active, Sold, Under Contract, etc)

- "View-ability": Currently map takes up about 40% of the page. We'd like a better solution, either make it 50% (like Redfin) or make it bigger, like 60% of the screen (like Zillow).

- Navigation: Currently users can only zoom in and out of the map. We'd like to integrate the filters (the buttons below the map) better. The goal is for these filters to be an on-off toggle for the icons they represent above, so it needs to be an integral part of the design (make it more obvious that they serve a key function).

- Chat interface: Current chat feature has a clunky messaging feature (typing window too small) and it's hard to review historical messages. Need this to be more intuitive and similar to more commonly used messaging windows (like ios SMS, FB Messenger, Skype) without removing the current details.

5. MOBILE RESPONSIVENESS: We need a better solution to the current mobile optimization. Please open current Buyers Page on mobile. Issues include:

- Above-the-fold view: Currently we have the map view as default, and it's not immediately obvious to users what they can do after landing on the page. Redfin might have a better solution, please check the mobile link by mobile.

- Map / List Toggle View: Current button is ugly, and not intuitive. Need to make this very easy to use and obvious to user. Again, Redfin might have superior solution.

- Property View: Lots of wasted spaces and broken layout. A better solution might to have the text overlaid on the image to maximize phone screen space (again, check Redfin for this).

NOTE: The models / sample pages have a lot of features and tools that you might want to add to the new design. Please do NOT do so. We would like to improve on the current Buyers Page, the new features we'll add much later on. For now, the focus is on what's currently on the page and elements listed above.

For example, the model pages have a search bar in their header, we don't. Do NOT add this. We can add simple updates (like a toggle view for photos and details in the Property view) to solve the issues above, bit we are NOT looking to add new tools and features. The models / samples pages are there mostly as design inspirations.

Other notes

Before making any design, we encourage designers to spend time playing with our current Buyers Page, and then spend double that time checking the model /sample pages.

Doing this makes it easier to understand our goals and the issues highlighted above (Content Details section). A lot of the design elements should take in consideration the usability issues we're trying to solve.

Ultimately, the winning design would:

- Give us a design / theme good enough to can use as base for all of our tools and pages. Branding, color scheme, font consistency, are key.

- Have design elements that answer usability issues highlighted above. EX: we have a Buyers Page with weak above-the-fold which doesn't invite user to take action; new design should be so good and easy to follow that it prompts user to engage and do something.

- Have great mobile responsiveness. We won't be using a separate mobile URL for this when we push this live, everything will be optimized for a single URL (no http://www.m.website.com version). This means the design should accommodate this flexibility / responsiveness.